sm SECTION ONE
sm
THE FIFTH BEATLE
or
EVERYBODY HATED MURRAY
MURRAY THE K INTERVIEWS THE BLACKLISTED JOURNALIST
Bearsville, N.Y.
Ah, vey! Ah, vey! Everybody hated Murray, hated him for his power and his success, hated him because he screamed and hollered and wore tight pants, hated him because he forced his ego down your throat like a hard-sell used car dealer who makes it seem like you're going to buy the car anyway but you've also got to take him along as part of the deal. Murray's ego was always too big for you to swallow. It could get stuck in your gullet and gnaw on your craw and hang heavy on your digestion like a balloon of cold fat. Murray had a style that somehow couldn't get the job done without rubbing against the grain. But he had a style.
They hated him because he was brash and outrageous, like his rakish hats and his 62 outfits, lavender striped shirts, elf boots, Russian hats, flipnik jerseys, all earned by the cynical twist of his mouth, by screams, grunts, giggles, yuks, gasps, gargles, falsettos and a machine gun delivery of jive talk, into the microphone, baby, Broadway hep, dialect street gang, Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man Lah-dee-Dah, Nigger English, Ah, vey!, beyezull sheyezit. They hated him because the kids loved it, and here was Murray, raping their minds like a dirty old miser. He used to make maybe $150,000 a year, maybe a lot more, Murray the K, who wouldn't take no for an answer, the walking definition of chutzpah, the kind of guy who'd use your front step for a bathroom and then ring the doorbell to ask for toilet paper.
They hated him because he dared to pander to underage taste, because he dared to understand what his audience wanted, because he dared to blow his pied pipes to the young, stealing their loyalty from their mothers and coaches and teachers and fathers and principals and troop masters and PAL pals and all the other parental authorities who wanted their kids to grow up to be them and certainly not like Murray the K, leading them off to places they could never get back from. Remember 1010 WINS and the Submarine Race Watcher's Club? "Submarine race watching," says Murray, "well, what's a cheap date but to take your girl and to drive somewhere and park and look out over the ocean or the river or a lake? 'We're going to watch the submarines, honey... Well, honey, you can't see 'em, but they're there, racing in the water.'"
The Submarine Race Watchers' Club, a cheap date, take your girl and park by the water while, from the dashboard, you listen to 1010 WINS, Murray the K and his Swingin' Soiree. Once Murray announced he was going to make an appearance at Plum Beach to preside personally over a meeting of the club. He never got there. On the way he found himself glommed up in a traffic jam that had the Belt Parkway tied up for 10 miles. "What's happenin'?" he asked a cop. "Oh," the cop answered, "some crazy disc jockey announced on the radio that something was going on at Plum Beach." They hated him for things like that.
Or the time they asked Murray to help stop the street gang wars in Brooklyn. He scheduled a meeting at Boys High in Bedford-Stuyvesant, went to the gang leaders and told them to bring their gangs. The place was mobbed, but well behaved. Afterwards, the National Review commented it was a damn shame that the only dialogue the kids could relate to was with a frenetic, ungrammatical person like Murray. They hated him for things like that, too.
Or the time the Office of Economic Opportunity asked 36 high school dropouts for a list of the 10 people they trusted most. Of course Murray's name was on the list. The OEO had never heard of him but they invited him down to Washington. They thought they'd be nice to him and maybe he'd throw in a plug on his radio show. They never expected him to have any ideas of his own. "When these kids get into trouble, who do they talk to?" Murray told them. "They don't go to their parents. They don't go to their clergymen. They don't go to their teachers. They go to their best friends. They tell their best friends everything. We've got to get to their best friends."
Murray got the job of putting together a 60-minute OEO TV special, It's What's Happening, Baby, featuring a cast of rock stars he got together for free and a message directed against dropping out. One senator called the president of CBS during the program to say he was throwing up. Another senator called it immoral, lousy and double lousy. They hated Murray for that, too.
Pros fight hard and Murray is a pro. When you fight hard, you leave a lot of wounded. Murray the K with his dancing girls, with his wife, Jackie the K, with his Meyerzurray Language and his Listening Post and his sound effects and his mystery stories. Murray the K, the Fifth Beatle, and what did Brian Epstein, George Martin and John, Paul, George and Ringo have to say about that? Murray the K who played records like Little Richard's Tutti Fruti when nobody else dared to. Murray the K, who played The Yellow Rose of Texas 14 times in a row at different speeds. They hated him because he was an opportunist, they hated him because he was commercial, but most of all they hated him because he was different.
* * *
I wrote what you've just read as the first of a series of columns about Murray the K in 1971, when I found him forgotten in self-exile in Washington, D.C., where I, too, was later to be forgotten in self-exile. He was living with an ex-cover girl named Judy Black, who charmed me into being depressed that I didn't have whatever it was that Murray had, but then Murray was famous for his squeezes. They hated him for that, too. I remember the first American Beatles tour back in 1964, when getting in to see the Fab Four was as easy as giving a hotfoot to the Pope. The Beatles were renting half a floor at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, with fans trying to climb up through ventilator shafts, and when Murray emerged from the elevator with two dream foxes, Paul McCartney had to rescue him from being kicked back downstairs by the Nobody-But-NOBODY-Gets-In-Here Squad. I was standing with Brian Epstein as Paul ushered Murray and the two ladies into his room and then closed the door on them so he could say to Brian, "Tell them Murray's alright---he always brings the best birds."
* * *
...He talks about show business, about how he was a Hollywood brat, Murray Kaufman, a child actor, playing with Eddie Cantor in The Kid From Spain when he was five, with Al Jolson in Hold Onto Your Hats when he was nine. "I did nine pictures and a couple of shorts and I became a has-been at 11," he says. He talks about how he danced a while, did monologues and emceed his first radio program when he was 19, a variety show called Full Speed Ahead on the Mutual Network.
Murray Kaufman, always a fast-talker. At 20 he decided that comedy wasn't his bag and he started an advertising agency. Then he managed major league ball players, 50 of them, including Mickey Mantle, Johnny Mize and Sal Maglie. He soon found himself back in radio doing a talk show with Larraine Day, then with Virginia Graham and then with Eva Gabor. He hopped from station to station until he started playing music on an all-night program on WMCA. He was still Murray Kaufman when he went to 1010 WINS in 1958. He was going to call his new program The Swingin' Soiree and they asked him how he wanted to be billed. "I thought for three seconds," he says, "and then I told them, 'The Swingin' Soiree with Murray the K.'
* * *
In 1971, Murray and Judy were living in her house on one of the fancy residential streets in the Cleveland Park section of D.C., teaming up as jocks on WHFS, just across the Maryland state line in Bethesda, a 5,000-watt station that has since become maybe the last of the important free-form FM innovators. When you live in Washington, you know how lucky you are to have a station like WHFS. In little more than a month, Murray'd become No. 1 in the ratings. Oh, they loved him at WHFS. Eight years later, the station manager, Jake Einstein, was telling me, "If I heard that Murray got himself nominated for President, I wouldn't be surprised. If he got elected I wouldn't be surprised." But back in 1971, Murray still reminded me of a White Russian prince who'd had to settle for a job as a headwaiter. He was broke and he missed New York.
* * *
"I would play a new record," says Murray, "it would take off in New York and within a week it would break out all over the country, it would become a monster." He broke Fingertips by Little Stevie Wonder and Baby Love by the Supremes and Will You Love Me Tomorrow? by the Shirelles and Tonight, Tonight by the Mello Kings. He broke Be My Baby by the Ronettes and It's Not Unusual by Tom Jones and It's Not For Me To Say by Johnny Mathis and Walk On By by Dionne Warwick and --- would you believe it? --- Like A Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. That was all on 1010 WINS. That was all by Murray the K's first version of himself...But they don't break records in New York anymore, not on Top 40 radio and certainly not like they did when they had Scott Muni on WABC, B. Mitchell Reed on WMCA and Murray the K on WINS, all in the prime time slot competing with one another. Together they had 50 per cent of New York's listening audience. Of the three, only WABC still plays rock and the best percentage it can get is no more than 18...What happened to all those AM listeners in New York? FM. And who became one of the first and most important pioneers in FM programming? That old loudmouth of hysterical AM radio, Murray the K.
* * *
I've known Murray long enough to think I'd never shed a tear for him. I met him back in the 50s when I took a freelance assignment to interview him for a juke box trade sheet in Newark, N.J. This was during the big Congressional payola snoop, which was not the theme of the trade sheet's story, but Murray gave me nothing but double talk anyway. Ah, vey! Years later, when I was managing a group called the Myddle Class, I traded a distributor all the free records Atlantic'd give me on credit for a Number One hit in Albany, so don't talk to me about payola. I still haven't paid Atlantic. What I learned about payola is that it won't work if the groves don't tickle the stylus just right. Payola only works when the record's a hit anyway. The trouble is there are more hits coming out of the recording studios than there is time on the radio to play them all. Otherwise, there are enough dummies out there to buy anything. When Murray's pockets get searched at the Pearly Gates, he's going to have to do the fastest talking of his life. Ha, ha. Murray always knew when to take money. I'd like to say he never played a record that was a stiff, except he played a few for me. I never gave him any money. I just wrote about him because he was one of the most interesting characters of my time. When you live, they stick you in the can, when you die, they build monuments for you. Alan Freed got nailed for payola, but never Murray. Alan Freed did time and died hurting, but now they've got his name up in lights as the No. 1 Rock Jock of all time, the man who gave rock 'n' roll its name. He did, you know. And when they do the casting to find out who's going to play No. 2, I nominate Murray the K.
* * *
He talks about how he began to attract crowds so large, they'd throw him out of public places just to get rid of the mob. He remembers his minute mysteries, complete with sound effects, squeaking doors, cavalry charges, screams, men falling into an abyss. "I'd cue up a record so that the opening line of the song would be the punch line to the bit," Murray says. "Like, the first thing you'd hear was a space mystery sound effect. I would come on in an eerie and low and mysterious kind of delivery. I'd say, 'There was this brilliant light, I could see it in the house. It started to change colors. The reflection of the light on the room would go from orange to purple to pink. I went to the window and I saw this very strange ship hovering about 100 yards from my house and about 50 feet high. Then it made this cacophony of sounds. I watched in almost disbelief as the ship lowered itself to the ground. The ship itself started to change colors. The light became a brilliant orange glow. Suddenly a door appeared on the side of the ship and it opened and these three creatures walked out and came toward my house. They were like toothpick-thin with green and yellow faces, with antennae coming out of their heads, out of a part covered with strange purple hair. Their arms were orange and their legs were green and they had bug eyes. They came toward the house. I couldn't imagine that these could be human beings from earth, and I was right. Because when they approached the house, they saw me standing in the window. They suddenly stopped. It was then I realized they were form another planet --- when they opened up their mouths and said...'" Murray pauses, "At that point," he says, "I'd start the record and you'd hear, 'Bom-bom be-bom, be bom-bom be-bom, be-bom-bom be-bom, blue moooon..." and the record would be Blue Moon by the Marcels."
* * *
Murray also broke Bobby Darin. Splish Splash. Bobby's first big hit. When Bobby was still a nobody, Bobby knew Murray could do it for him. Murray could make him a star. Bobby went after Murray, romanced him, hung out at his house. It was Murray who came up with the title --- Murray or Murray's wife or Murray's mother. I've heard all three versions. It was a Saturday night and Bobby was at Murray's house, talking about taking a
In the last 12 years
of
Bobby Darin's life, he never talked too much about Murray
bath and somebody dropped the line. "Splish Splash, I was takin' a bath." Bobby and Murray were two of the slickest, glib-tongued, computer-fast, angle-figuring, never-take-no-for-an-answer, risk-defying, shameless and dedicated con artists you'd ever want to tickle, cajole, joke, flimflam and otherwise charm you out of your "I Gave" button. "Splish Splash, I was takin' a bath." Bobby heard the line drop, picked it up, ran home, wrote the song, gave Murray part of the copyright and Murray played the shit out of the record. How can that be illegal? It was an artistic collaboration. The song never would've been written or recorded any other way. At least that's the version I liked best. I was a good friend of Bobby's for the last 12 years of his life, but in all that time, he never talked too much about Murray. They'd stopped seeing each other, but it was inevitable that two egos growing as brashy big as Bobby's and Murray's soon wouldn't fit into the same room. A few years later, and Murray was badmouthing Bobby, to me, to others. When I mentioned it to Bobby, he said, "Murray? Murray can say anything he wants about me. Murray's entitled."
* * *
"When I'd do my shows at the Brooklyn Fox or the Brooklyn Paramount, they'd judge the performances not by how many seats were filled but by how many chairs I'd go through," he says. We were sitting in his living room with a few dinner guests listening to him talk about his days at 1010 WINS. Murray Kaufman hadn't been Murray the K three months when he was doing his first Christmas show, live at the Brooklyn Paramount. Murray learned a lot from Alan Freed. You help break an unknown act, you play their records, you plug them to stardom and then you ask them to come and perform for you on your live rock and roll show, cheap, working for scale... "They would judge every performance by how many chairs I'd break," he says. "With my foot. Backstage. I'd watch every second of every show. I'd stand there with my foot up on the chair. To get in six shows a day, you know, we had to run it on a very tight schedule, and if an electrician missed a cue or a performer was late coming down from the dressing room, my foot would go right through the chair. Wow, I wasn't a happy man. They'd say, 'Murray, you broke the house record!' I should be happy but I was miserable. There'd be 11,000 people waiting on line outside and I should be elated, but instead I'm in a frenzy, I'm worrying, 'How're we going to clear the house in time to get the people seated for the next show?'"
* * *
When the Beatles first landed in New York in 1964, every big-time, hot-shot DJ in the world who could command an expense account headed for the Plaza expecting an exclusive interview, but when Murray showed up, it wasn't with a tape recorder, it was with the Ronettes. "We met the Beatles in Europe," explained Ronnie Spector, lead singer of the three-girl group. Boy, did they look exotic that night. Murray the Manipulator. Murray Machiavelli. There he was on the parlor car called The St. George when the Beatles trained it down to the D.C. Coliseum gig. After the show, the Beatles camped overnight at the ultra, ultra Hotel Shoreham and Ringo wandered into the press room with a drink in his hand and a beam on his face. He stayed long enough to get friendly with everybody, rapping about everything from his singing ambitions to how it hurt to get hit by American jelly beans. He said the English jelly beans were softer. Already the press corps was hating Murray because he'd been able to get so friendly with the Beatles on the parlor car ride, and some of the reporters started asking questions designed to let Ringo know they thought Murray was a three-dollar-and twenty-seven-cent bill. "I can spot a phony a mile away," Ringo answered confidently. "You're not able to accomplish what we've accomplished if you don't learn how to spot a phony. Murray is the hippest, swingingest guy I ever met." As the first American Beatles tour continued, Murray became George Harrison's roommate. While a tape recorder army of jocks and radio news reporters from all over the Beatlemania-crazed world starved on crumbs because they couldn't even get on the same floor as the Beatles, Murray was doing his daily broadcasts directed from the Beatles' hotel rooms. Brian Epstein began complaining about Murray's influence on the Fab Four. People who didn't know better started calling Murray the Fifth Beatle. Murray didn't mind the billing. He tried to put it up in lights. Murray the K, the Fifth Beatle.
* * *
In 1965, 1010 WINS was going to go on an all-news format anyway. They asked for a couple of extensions on Murray's contract and finally he said no. The Beatles were after him to come to Nassau, where they were filming Help! There was talk of him doing a series with them. Murray was also onto a network TV special and there were people who were going to back him in producing TV shows for syndication. All of a sudden he was off the air...
* * *
By 1965, Murray's Easter show at the Brooklyn Fox was an annual event, grossing $298,000 while the competition at the Manhattan Paramount could only sell $90,000 worth of tickets. Murray was coining money as fast as he was coining words. He also gave away 800,000 copies of his Meyezurray Language dictionaries. The Pharaoh of Flash. The Grandee of Gimmick. He left his impact on our culture. He helped change the way we speak as well as the music we listen to. What a Mr. Slick! If you wanted Murray to play your record, you had to give him the right to include the cut in his own anthology albums, just in case your record became a hit. Murray put out 20 different anthology albums, calling them Golden Gassers or Blasts from the Past, and he sold six million copies. After all, Murray debuted 10 new records a day, 150 different new tunes a week while WMCA was playing only 60 at the most. "I didn't have a play list," Murray said. "I couldn't work with a play list. I mean I didn't have any program director telling me what to play on my show." You could also get Murray the K T-shirts.
So they hated him because he was easy to hate, because he came from old-fashioned, stage mama, New York pushy, tinsel-plated, circus trunk, show bizzy, total pretense, Hollywood jive, zoot-suit roots. He always made me feel like he was flashing 60 karat diamond rings on every finger even when he was down and out. I remember he was never broke enough not to be able to afford a manicure but Bobby Callender, who spent years as Murray's Main Man, picking the records for Murray to play, remembers him as usually unkempt. I guess Murray considered me a dress occasion. I'll testify to history that Murray was always fun to be with. He was exciting. He had the magic to make you want to run with him, but that's everybody's con. Oh, they hated him because a man that abrasive wasn't supposed to be that charming. He didn't look like a hero and he didn't sound like a hero and he didn't act like a hero, so how come he is a hero? Murray used to get demoralized by what they said in the newspapers. He began to fantasize about putting out a contract on Journal-American columnist Jack O'Brian. Murray wanted respect. He didn't want to have to get pies thrown in his face to make a living any more. He wanted to be recognized as an intelligent man. He knew how smart he was. "It wasn't enough that my stage shows were doing better than ever," he later told me. "That in addition to being a radio personality, a TV producer and everything else ... I seemed to feel a definite need to be a rock and roll philosopher king. Besides, I was getting tired of being Murray the K."
* * *
Murray the K is not the kind of egotist you would want to give more credit than he's due and yet he often ends up due more credit than he gets. Murray didn't invent free-form radio, but he popularized it. As Murray says, with his usual self-effacement, "I created WOR-FM."
* * *
What Murray knew was that the fans never outgrow heroes who inspire them but teddy bears get left behind, except by the wimps who're still thumb-suckers at 40. Meaning that Murray had to give up the kid stuff and grow up with his audience or grow comfortable typecast as a play pen prop, an infant squeeze, an Uncle Don, always on the cruise for more newborn to mind-rape. Well even an idiot like Murray could see that newborn were an endangered species. Nobody was having babies any more. Better to keep feeding off the people he already had, to ride the population crest of the war baby boom, destined to leave the echo of too many empty classrooms as it grew old and prosperous and began to have its own babies. The money was in maturity. Bubblegum grows up to be Adult Oriented Radio. Besides, Murray liked the music. He was as much a Beatles fan as the rest of us. His third eye responded to Bob Dylan, too. Murray knew there was a profit to be made in playing 16-minute cuts on the radio, but he also shared the outrage of all the fans and musicians who were being denied a place on radio for the records they wanted to hear.
* * *
The year 1966 brought with it some dramatic spiritual transfigurations within the rock community. People were mooning out all over the place. No longer on radio, Murray toured with the Beatles, did TV specials, went to Europe and wrote a book Murray the K Tells It Like It Is. In the book, he talked about God and predicted the break-up of the Beatles. He also lent his name to a new multi-media club, Murray the K's World, a reconverted airplane hangar at Roosevelt Field, L.I., complete with 21 screens for the world's biggest psychedelic light show. The club made the cover of Life but Murray stayed only a week. He ended up suing the club owner.
In the meantime, the FCC was handing down its monumental "50-50" rule, ordering stations that had both AM and FM channels to stop simulcasting more than four hours a day and to begin to separate AM and FM programming. A lot of people thought this was supposed to clear the air of too much rock, but what it did was put an H-bomb in the hands of the leaders of the FM revolution.
* * *
Murray was discussing a possible TV show with the general manager of WOR when the general manager mentioned he needed a new format for WOR-FM. The "50-50" rule. Murray started explaining how the war baby boom was growing up and buying albums instead of singles and also buying stereos and motorcycles and pickup trucks and baby carriages. The artists grow and the jocks who present the artists to the listeners have to grow, too, and you couldn't hear an album cut on the radio. The public's ear was getting more sophisticated. People wanted better sounds and you could get better sounds on FM. The competition wasn't AM radio. The competition was to get the guy to listen to your radio station instead of listening to the album he just bought. "You didn't have to hype the record any more," Murray later explained. "The music was speaking for itself." The general manager of WOR gave Murray carte blanche control in establishing a new rock music format for WOR-FM.
* * *
It was Murray's second time out. He was back on the air again, but no longer the screaming meemie of hysterical radio. It was soft-spoken Murray now. He began playing what he called "attitude" music. He developed what he called "block programming." He cut the commercial down to 10 minutes an hour and began playing long, uninterrupted sets of album cuts.
He began playing concerts of different songs by the same artist. He began playing concerts of songs by different artists about the same theme. Scott Muni joined the station as a jock. Rosko arrived. Joan Baez began dropping in for live raps on the air. Peter Yarrow would visit and talk. Paul Simon would come by. Soon Murray began inviting guests, new groups, established artists, celebrities in other fields.
He did an interview with Mayor Lindsay. William F. Buckley was a guest on his show. "I played him some songs for him to comment on," Murray remembers. "When I played him With God On Our Side, he said 'I'll have to think about that.'" As his audience grew, Murray found he had the power to break albums. He was the first to play Richie Havens, the BeeGees, the Who, the Cream, Jimi Hendrix.
He played Janis Ian's Society's Child while it was still banned by all the other stations because it was about a white girl who had a black boyfriend. He was the first to play Bob Dylan's Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands on commercial radio. There wasn't an AM station in New York that would play a Bob Dylan album cut. Richard Goldstein wrote an article calling Murray a pioneer of the New Culture.
WOR-FM became a commercial success. Then management decided to make it even more of a commercial success. Format designer Bill Drake had a contract with the RKO-Mutual chain that allowed him to move into any station he saw fit. One day Murray received a memo telling him that only certain albums and certain cuts had been cleared for air play.
"At first I laughed," Murray remembers. "Then I knew it was all over. The Drake formula was coming in. I wasn't going to conform to any play list. I had promised I wouldn't quit on the air. I sent a telegram saying I couldn't conform to these regulations. Then I went to see Bob Smith.
"Bob is a very smart radio man. He runs the most successful station in the world, WOR-AM. WOR-FM had been his baby. He said, 'Murray, there's no one for me to turn to. The people above me are lawyers and accountants. None of them know anything about radio. All they know is that Drake has taken station after station out of the red. There's no one to explain to what kind of culture we've created here.'
"I can't work under a tight restrictive format. I don't ever want to follow. I want to lead. That night I went home and I didn't sleep. The next day I called him again. That night I felt a deep, sharp pain in my chest."
Murray the K had suffered a heart attack.
* * *
He was never the same after the heart attack. He just couldn't talk as fast any more. For those of us who'd now him at his most arrogant, his walk'd become crossed by the shadow of the pitiable, his peacock strut'd slouched. Playing Murray took more energy than it takes most men to play themselves. After the heart attack, Murray just couldn't get up the steam to get up the steam. Obviously nothing was going right in his life. His bubble of bullshit had burst. There were too many loose ends for a sick man to cope with. He just didn't want to go back to playing a role on the radio. He was sick and tired of clawing his way to the top only to get kicked back down to the bottom. Oh, he was enough of a pro to know he had to get back up off the canvas again. He just wanted to take the eight-count and get a little
After getting out of the hospital, Murray wondered how he was going to support himself in the manner to which he was accustomed
rest. Besides, how many times must a man win the world championship without having to prove himself again? "I didn't know if I really wanted to come back into radio under any conditions," he later told me. "I felt as if I had done it all." After getting out of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Murray spent two months in Florida doing nothing but wondering how he was going to support himself in the manner to which he was accustomed by doing nothing. When CHUM-FM started broadcasting from Toronto, it hired Murray to help kick off the station with some glamour dazzle. Murray was learning how far he could coast on his name. In New York, he tried a weekend slot on WMCA but escaped when they tried to chain him to a play list. NBC's syndicated Monitor network gave Murray a respectable show and he was in New York from then on for most weekends to do it. Meanwhile, he'd managed to con someone into putting up $116,000 so he could squander it on a TV special, Murray the K in New York, but he later copped to me he was crazy at the time. "It turned out the most expensive local TV show in history," he said. So he goes to visit relatives in Falls Church, Va., a kind of town where CIA bureaucrats live, and he meets the vp of the chain that owns WWDC in Washington. AVCO Broadcasting. The vp offers Murray a job. Murray takes it.
* * *
"I thought, 'Hey, man, they pick the music," Murray says. "'Wow! I don't have any responsibility here, on a station where all you have to do is be pleasant.' It took me a month or so to stop trying to try. I had a beautiful one year and 13 weeks of novocaine radio. The swingingest thing I had to play was Englebert Humperdinck or Tom Jones. Sometimes I'd do a little schtick, I'd say, 'and now we have a triangle of music,' and I'd play Andy William and Herb Alpert and Claudine Longet in between.
"Once I stayed on the air for 30 hours with just a six-hour break. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing to raise money for the Children's Hospital Christmas Fund. Everybody called it The Miracle of Brookville Road. There wasn't enough time before Christmas for people to mail the money in so they would drive up to the station on this back road in Silver Spring and just drop it off. We collected $37,000...But mostly I would walk into the station a minute before my show and not even think about the music. I'd be off at 5:30 and in 20 seconds I had forgotten about anything I did on my programs.
* * *
It was Steve Popovich, then vp in charge of promotion at Columbia Records, who hipped me that Murray was hurting in D.C. What a story! By the time I caught up to him, he'd moved from WWDC to WHFS. He was on the air when I came up to the station to see him.
* * *
He was wearing a jaunty white cap, tight beige jeans and a matching denim jacket. He looks just a little drawn and sometimes even perhaps a bit unsure, but still he reigns over his DJ booth with the authority of someone who has known command. When he talks into the microphone, he is casual and chooses his words carefully. He is not afraid of long pauses. A stereo headset hangs loosely over his cap. Murray listens to the music he plays. When it comes to radio, Murray is still a pro.
* * *
When I walked in, Maggie May was on the turntable. When it finished, Murray put me right on the air. I'd been on the air with Murray lots of times, but I was always a dull interview. With Murray, he'd put me up tight. He was too good a talker. He'd play with me like a cat with a mouse. It was hard to ask Murray a question because it was hard to trust his answer. Didn't you notice how he always had a smirk to his smile, as if he intended to cop out on Accounting Day saying, "Aw, you knew I was kidding the whole time?" The better you knew how to play the game, the easier it was for you to cheat, and since everybody was playing against a stacked deck anyway, you couldn't survive without cheating. Murray'd learned that the guy who makes up the rules has a better chance of winning and he was living in an era where the rules hadn't been made up yet. Murray was a whiz at his game. Whenever Murray interviewed me on the radio, he was always kind to me, but he'd never leave much space for me to talk. It'd always end up he'd use me as a mop to wax philosophical. Murray'd sound creaky when he started solving mankind's problems. He was the best at putting you in the mood to have fun and get laid, which, Murray knew, was what rock and roll was all about. But he was the superbest at telling stories. I've still got a picture of the two of us grinning into the camera from behind WOR-FM microphones on a tiny make-do table in the days when Murray was first improvising the station. Robert Stigwood brought the BeeGees up to get interviewed that night. They were fresh off the plane. When he interviewed me that other day at WHFS, we reminisced about the ride to D.C. aboard the Beatles' parlor car. Wasn't it called the St. George? Murray and I also spent a lot of time in airplanes together. But sitting in his WHFS booth with his cap and his headset, Murray reminded me of a dispatcher in a bus terminal. This was no role for Murray the K.
* * *
"I've helped a lot of people and a lot of people have helped me. I was the first to bring the Moody Blues to this country, the Who, the Cream, Hendrix. I was the first to bring the Rolling Stones to New York. I was sitting in the Ad Lib Club in London with John Lennon one night and he said he had these friends in a group called the Rolling stones and why don't I bring them to New York. So I booked them into Carnegie Hall and gave the date to Billy Fields..."
* * *
In D.C., Murray asked that whatever I wrote would I please not mention that he was living with Judy. He gave me some complicated explanation that had either to do with Judy's divorce or with a plan Murray had to try to scam some money out of Jackie, the wife from whom he was now estranged. More manipulations by Murray. Somewhere there must've been a ledger to keep track of all the different stories he was telling all the different people. Murray worked hard at playing his roles. He worked hard at everything he did. He'd spend hours preparing his programs. WHFS didn't even have a record library, and Murray had to bring his own albums to do his show. Judy'd spend hours helping him. He was going to make a star out of Judy. She'd fly with him to New York on weekends when he went to do his Monitor shows. They'd stay in a suite at the Essex House. I remember one plane ride with them from D.C. to New York that took two and a half hours. The plane ended up stacked in a hurricane and they ran out of barf bags in the passenger cabin. What a stink! Murray had this scheme to break back into the big time with a programming concept he called Radio Free America. He anticipated automated radio, but Murray was always a visionary. Automated radio was going to make it cheap to run an FM station. All you needed was a transmitter, a tape deck, an engineer and a license. You could buy all your programming from Murray the K. He'd send it to you on a tape reel. You didn't need any disc jockeys on your payroll. The tapes Murray played me actually made me think I was going to like automated radio. You've got to understand in those days, in places like Vermont and Utah, you couldn't get anything on the air except Perry Como. It was going to take automated radio to bring Bob Dylan to the sticks. "You'll bury Drake." I said. But Drake has buried Murray.
* * *
It's late at night and we're sitting in Murray the K's living room, our faces flickering in the candlelight. Murray has been seeing a lot of a beautiful, bright blonde named Judy Black and she's curled up on the couch next to him. He's telling what it's like to be an ogre and then have your fangs pulled. How did King Farouk feel after they took his dirty magazines away and kicked him out of Egypt? Or Napoleon, sent to Elba without either his army or his elevator boots? Ah, vey!
* * *
In 1971, Murray was a corny pot smoker, still doing anteaters, emptying the tobacco out of Marlboros to pack them with grass. He'd even muzzle-load them with his fingers instead of sucking up the grass into the hollowed cigarette the way an anteater uses its snout to lunch. That's why they're called anteaters, see. They're probably the most uneconomical way there is to smoke pot. They're also the mark of a closet head. Murray was a paranoid, alright. He knew how full of shit he was, so he knew how full of shit everybody else must be. I should talk. I didn't learn how to roll a good joint till I was 50. Murray told me he was 45 at the time. Actually he was 49. By 1971, the Beatles had long since gotten fed up with Murray and dropped him. When I asked George Harrison about Murray, all he'd say was "Murray's already taken all he's going to get."
* * *
I suddenly think of one more question to ask Murray. What ever happened between him and the Beatles? "Well," he says, "when I started with WOR-FM, I sort of got into my own thing. I mean, I was into what I was doing and we just didn't get to see much of each other anymore. I mean I did the series with them, I toured with them ... I'll tell you what happened. Here I was being treated like I was a Beatle myself. They had Murray the K Day at the Coca Cola Pavilion at the World's Fair and they had to ask me to leave because there were three-quarters of a million kids there. They used to come up to me just to touch me. And then I had the greatest realization --- that for five and a half years I was pretty successful before I even met the Beatles. It happened, man, it was a lucky break for me, but I realized that my career was becoming dependent on my association with the Beatles and when I had gotten by without them pretty well for five years. I didn't want it to be as if I was riding on their coattails..."
* * *
In the 15 years I'd known him, Murray'd never needed me too much. He was always friendly, but I'd have to go out of my way to get him to notice me. I didn't have anything to offer that he was in the market for. Not until 1971. Why did I spend so much effort getting close to Murray? I don't even know any more. I'd stay over with him at Judy's house. He'd bring me over to the radio station to hang out with Jake Einstein or some of the jocks --- Jake's son, David, or Cerphe Colwell or Damian. Years later, when I ended up broke and loony in D.C., living alone in a room overlooking Scott Circle, there was many a painful night when WHFS was my only friend. The point being that I was interested in Murray because I could identify with him.
* * *
WHFS is a 5,000-watt FM station with call letters that were meant to stand for High Fidelity Stereo. It was the first station to broadcast multiplex in the D.C. area, transmitting from a 150-foot antenna atop the Triangle Towers, a 15-story apartment house at Cordell Avenue, right across the street from the Psyche Deli and the Bank of Bethesda in Bethesda, Maryland ... Bethesda has one of the highest per capita incomes of all the municipalities in America. The WHFS studios are on the second floor of the Triangle Towers, a sort of luxury condominium with a swimming pool on the roof and a uniformed clerk behind a front desk in the lobby. Two-bedroom apartments rent for $327 a month in the Triangle Towers. WHFS occupies the equivalent of three of those apartments. You walk into a dimly lit reception room, you find yourself face to face with a psychedelic gas station pump and you hear a familiar voice coming from the low-keyed speaker box, a little taste of the station's product just in case you think you're in the coroner's office...
* * *
Murray ran his end of the station like a home movie. To get away with being Murray the K, you've got to come to terms with the fact you're a walking spectacle. That makes anything you do interesting. The way you look at your watch. How about the way you throw a quarter into the highway toll machine? Murray'd learned to pose as if somebody was watching every move he made. WHFS was comfortable for Murray, friendly. He could be a star there. I've never known Murray not to act like one, which is to say, spoiled. Judy babied him. And he treated her like dirt, bossed her around, threw tantrums. His needs came first. He was always busy doing something very important, and nothing could stand in his way. Judy was his squeeze, his secretary, his nurse, his mama, his nana, his girl Friday and his scapegoat. She claimed to be a country girl but she couldn't've been more supercharm if she'd gone to a Swiss finishing school. Once, when she took me to see her horse, which she kept at a suburban Maryland stable, she picked a buttercup and handed it to me and I fell in love. Looking at her made me tingle. I couldn't understand why beautiful, sexy, talented and intelligent women like Judy always ended up with heels like Murray. Oh, I hated him for that.
* * *
What is there about a disc jockey that makes you want to tune into his program night after night with you can hear almost all the same records being played on any number of other stations? ... You can see him sitting at his microphone, his knee jiggling to the music, his body dancing as he sits in his chair, moving back and forth ... as if he's pumping up the energy ... you can feel the cadence as he turns the knobs and cues up the records and answers the phones and reads off the commercials, all the while moving from one record to the next as instinctively as the way a poet chooses his words, the way a quarterback calls
You can hear that the jock knows he's taking you with him instead of you taking him with you
his plays, the way a boxer executes his patterns. I'm sure you've listened to that kind of radio, maybe riding in your car on a sensual moonlit night while, one after another, the records come at you out of the dashboard in exactly the right sequence ... you can her it in the jock's voice, that he knows he's doing this to you. You can hear it in what he says, that he knows he's now taking you with him, instead of you taking him with you. You can feel a pulse, a throb, a drive, an excitement, a joy until, if you're riding in a car and you get to where you're going, you want to sit in your car and stay parked and keep on listening.
* * *
In 1971, I was managing acts that were putting out albums. Too bad they were stiffs, but Murray played them on WHFS anyway. He played them enough to create a D.C. cult for at least one of the acts, a folk singer. What does an act know? The folk singer thought he got those fans all on his own, on his good looks and on his thrilling voice and on his marvelous talent and on his irresistible personality. But he still sells tickets in D.C. thanks to Murray the K.
* * *
Murray likes his new lifestyle. A kitten named Motorcycle jumps on his couch and nestles in his lap. He still goes to New York to do his Monitor shows and every once in a while he's hired as the host for some place like Barney Google's. Last summer he emceed one of the Schaefer Festival concerts in Central Park. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley were on the bill and Murray felt peculiar about it. Suddenly he finds himself being repaid favors he never realized he was owed. He also find himself running into enemies he never realized he had.
* * *
Murray is driving a brown Mercury in 1971. Something like that. Nothing fancy. It could've fooled you into thinking it was a Cadillac if you wanted to. But it wasn't. To me, Murray was the Cadillac type. The truth is he was debonair. His self-confidence made him sexy. The women loved his energy. Besides, he bullshitted them to death. Had he already met Jackie Zeman while he was still living with Judy? I was so unconscious I didn't find out about Jackie Zeman until after Murray'd died. Not only did Murray and Judy have plenty going together that was nobody else's business, but Murray had plenty going that was none of Judy's business. Or mine. I didn't pry. Murray already was telling me too much. Obviously, Murray knew how to talk to the birds and the bees to've been able to attract all that sweet honey he got in his lifetime. But posing for me, Murray and Judy acted like a typical middle class couple preoccupied with over-achievement. Murray was ready to make a move when I looked him up in 1971. He was consumed with trying to sell his Radio Free America concept. Visionary, shmisionary. He saw automated radio coming, and he wanted to cash in on his foresight. He wanted to get sprung from D.C. He needed a break. And here I was, writing a column for the New York Post. I was the DJ and Murray needed me to play his record. I played it seven times in a row.
* * *
It's getting late and I have to go. I chuckle over one of Murray's jokes, about a farmer who is in trouble because he has all hens and no rooster. A friend lends him a prize stud who immediately takes care of 88 chickens and then 43 guinea hens and then 27 gobbler turkeys and then suddenly stiffens and falls dead in the barn yard. A vulture starts to circle overhead. The farmer bends down and says to the rooster's lifeless form, "You dope, you didn't have to do it all in one day." The rooster slyly cocks an eye open, looks at the farmer and says, "Shhh. To get a vulture, you have to play their game."
* * *
When I started to write a column about Murray, I found I had too much to say. It all wouldn't fit into just one column, so I wrote a second. That wasn't enough to tell the story either, so I wrote a third. I kept on writing until I'd written seven columns in a row about Murray. I still could've written more. The next thing that happened was that WNBC hired Murray back onto the air in New York with a big publicity campaign. Some months later, I'm sitting in the Copa to see Stevie Wonder when Murray comes over, gets down on his knees, grabs my hand and spends the next 20 minutes thanking me.
Murray and I would get together from time to time afterwards. He kept trying to swindle me into deals so outrageous I never bothered listening to the details. My role was always to deliver the right people. Anybody who showed Murray some cash could sucker him into manipulating fools like me into a meeting. Nothing ever came of these scams, except Murray knew to use his name was always good for a few bucks. But as fast as Murray took it, it got taken from him. He was as born a mark as he was a born con man. A pushover. A sucker. Just pissed it all away in one non-stop golden shower. I remember him complaining that to protect himself he'd signed over his money to his second wife, the first Jackie, to whom he now had to say uncle every time he needed two cents. Murray was always in money trouble, just like me. But to me, a nickel was five pennies. A nickel to Murray meant $500. I hated him for that, too.
Murray seemed to start growing older faster after he came back to New York. He was always going to see doctors. He began having trouble with his eyes. On WNBC, there wasn't enough of a stage for Murray to tap dance his way back to No. 1 again, as if he still had the energy. He was too old to play Murray the K. At WNBC, Murray had to confine himself to a play list, although he was given a long leash within his cage plus plenty of room to stretch the rules. On WNBC, Murray was a pro, but, like he said, they challenge you every day in New York.
In D.C., he'd told me, "If you're No. 1, the only place you can go is down." The ex-Fifth Beatle would never be No. 1 again. On WNBC, Murray became just another survivor hanging on, not good enough for tenure in the bloody competition that New York City breeds. Murray's abrasive ego was bound to sandpaper somebody's sensitive skin. As soon as his big, leftover tenperament'd start giving his bosses more trouble then they thought it was worth at the box office, he'd be through. Murray was not the kind of guy who'd walk the plank into the Sea of Oblivion gracefully. In the meantime, I found myself being forced to walk the same plank.
I lost track of Murray's troubles when my own mountain got too high for me to see over it. Judy Black can testify how nuts I went in 1975 after my wife died, after the New York Post dropped my column and threw me off the payroll, after I was put through a Kafkaesque labor arbitration, after the acts I was managing breached, after my country shows failed, after I was blacklisted by the other New York newspapers and after the woman who succeeded my wife ran out on me. When Murray was hired back to New York, he abandoned Judy back in D.C., where she was left feeling as if she'd been nothing but a port in a storm, a convenience for Murray only while he needed a house and a bedwarmer in Washington. By 1975, Judy was living with a new old man on a farm in Virginia, and I went to visit them in an attempt to flee the army of demons in my head. Judy was sympathetic. After Murray'd left her, she told me, she'd gone nuts, too. She remembered picking up a knife and going out to stalk him.
"And then I caught myself," she said. "I said, 'What are you doing? He's not worth this!'" But I was so bats, she had to ask me to leave after one night. A couple of years later, I, too, was living in D.C., an outcast from New York as Murray had been, broke, lost and still crazy, but I was too embarrassed to contact Judy again. I haven't seen her since.
I thought of Murray often while I was living in D.C., but I was totally out of touch. Then I bumped into Steve Leeds, who'd worked for Murray at WHFS, graduating into the music business as a high-powered promotion man. Steve told me Murray was living in California. He gave me an address. One crazy night, I wrote Murray a desperation letter begging for a handout. He never answered it. In D.C., I'd get scraps of information about him. I heard that he played himself in I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a movie about three girl Beatles fans which got a lot of raves but not much box office and had to be put back into the vault. Then Jake Einstein told me Murray'd been hired as a consultant for the road show production of Beatlemania. Otherwise, Murray was supposed to be cooking up this deal and Murray was supposed to be cooking up that deal, and it was the same old story. When John Lennon was assassinated, there was Murray, all over the tube, the Fifth Beatle, on national television. Then I heard he was supposed to come east to put together a big concert and then I heard he had cancer. Like I said, I thought I'd never shed a tear for Murray.
I was about to make another stab at getting hold of Murray until I heard he had cancer and then I figured what's the use? The newspapers made it sound like he wasn't going to last long. It was anticlimactic to me a few months later when I heard he'd died. The next day, Steve Leeds phoned to tell me there'd be a memorial service for Murray at the Rabbi Stephen Wise Synagogue on West 68th Street. "I had a feeling about Murray last week," Steve said, "and I called him, but he wouldn't talk to me, he wouldn't come to the phone, he wouldn't get up out of bed. He didn't want to be disturbed. They told me he was down to 74 pounds. They told me he didn't want to see anybody, he didn't want to talk to anybody. I figured he just wanted to be left alone to die in peace. They said the doctors wanted him to go back into the hospital, but he was fed up with the hospital, he didn't want to go. He just wanted to stay home and get it over with. There were only a few people he'd see. Tony Orlando went out to Murray's house every day to take care of him."
I drove down to New York early the next morning, Ash Wednesday, 1982, in a car with a slow leak and a dead battery, but I was at the synagogue at 10 a.m. Except this couldn't be the right place. There was only a handful of people and nobody I knew. I went back into the lobby and asked a lady standing there if this was the service for Murray Kaufman. Yes, she said. I told you they hated him. They stayed away from his funeral in droves. I'd expected the place to be mobbed. I'd expected to see all the record company presidents and big-time radio people I hadn't seen since I went to Washington the way Murray did. As a refugee. Like I said, I identified with Murray. People hated me, too.
Murray died in a prison or irony. The night before the service, I'd watched Scott Muni being interviewed on TV news about the death of music on WABC, once the nation's No. 1 AM rocker, now the victim of Murray's FM Revolution. WABC announced it was going all-talk the day after Murray died. How's that for timing? As for Scott Muni, I hadn't seen him in eight years, and now here he was at Murray's memorial service. There were only four other persons I knew at the synagogue, Steve Leeds, Bobby Callender, and Rick and Sydelle Sklar. Rick'd been assistant program director at 1010 WINS when Murray arrived in the 50s. I hadn't seen Rick and Sydelle in eight years, either, but I'd thought about them almost every day. I still eat off the dishes that Sydelle'd given me after her mother died.
"Ah, Murray," Rick sighed. "He got hired at WINS because one millionaire was doing another millionaire a favor. Murray was emceeing shows at Palisades Amusement Park but he was having trouble getting acts. So the owner of the park asked the owner of the station to hire Murray as a jock, to give him more leverage to get acts. The owner of the station, Elroy McCaw, hired Murray over the head of the program director, Mel Leeds. Mel was watching a telethon and all of a sudden Murray is on it announcing that starting Friday of next week he'd have the nighttime slot on WINS. Mel almost fell out of his chair. That was the first he knew about it. Murray was something else, alright. I remember when he opened up Murray the K's World, he had to go low-budget for a while. Instead of wearing a toupee, he put black shoe polish on his head."
Scott, Rick and Murray'd been neighbors, all living in the same apartment building, the Lincoln Towers, on West End Avenue. Rick became the program director who quarterbacked WABC to first place as AM's top music station in America, and he was also the boss when Scott ran into static at WABC and left. Still neighbors, Scott and Rick haven't been too thrilled with each other since, but Scott, Rick and Murray'd been my three tightest friends in radio. I sat next to Rick during the service while memories tumbled through his mind like acrobats across a stage. Murray using a fire extinguisher for a sound effect to announce a Blast From The Past. Murray dressing up in a Hamlet suit with a bunch of Copa girls to lead a parade in Sheep Meadow protesting the city's ban against Joe Papp's Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. Murray locked in the subway for two weeks, doing his broadcasts from a station platform until some listener finds the silver token that'll set him free. Murray was supposed to sleep in the subway, too, but late every night the cops'd smuggle him to a comfortable suite at the Mayflower Hotel. As for the silver token, Mel Leeds, the program director, kept it in his pocket until the day he wanted to have a winner. Then he went down into the subway booth, stood next to the token-seller until a pretty blonde appeared at the hole in the window and slipped the silver token to the pretty blonde. She also got a year's worth of free subway rides, but today that's like a weekend in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Rick now runs programming for ABC Radio nationwide.
The rabbi was a woman. Murray would've liked that. She wasn't bad, either. She turned out to be the lady I'd asked in the lobby if this sorry turnout was really New York's farewell to the late, great Murray the K. Well, I didn't really say that to the rabbi. I later learned her name was Helene Ferris, and she didn't look Jewish, either, but if you're ever going to have a funeral, get her. She's the one. She's the best I've ever seen, aside from my family rabbi, Nathan M. Zuber, who I think circumcised me, except I can't remember. Rabbi Helene Ferris didn't make one wrong move or say one wrong word. A real pro. The most perfect memorial service I've ever attended, and it didn't last a second too long. Usually, you know, they're boring, but this lady rabbi got right to the point. Rabbis put away stiffs a dozen a day. They're always burying cadavers with faces they never saw. Whether she did or not, Rabbi Ferris made it sound like she knew all about Murray alright. Actually, she was addressing herself to Murray's sons, Jeff and Keith, sitting at the front with their mother, Claire, who was Murray's first wife. The rabbi obviously knew how they felt about their father. They didn't like him, either. What she told them is that when you have an explorer for an old man, he doesn't expect his report card to be graded on the basis of his home life, and explorers sometimes get lost exploring. Don't judge him too harshly because the other things he had on his mind might be what history remembers him for. "We are here," the rabbi said, "because Murray lived, not because he died." I knew Murray long enough to think I'd never shed a tear for him, but the tears were running down my cheek. Next to me, Rick was crying, too.
From Steve Leeds, I picked up the gossip that Murray's other son, Peter, was out on the coast, where Murray'd been cremated. Presumably, L.A. held its own memorial service. I wondered if that'd been a box office bomb, too. I swear to you I really never thought I'd shed a tear for Murray. He always managed to do alright. Here I'd been feeling sorry for him and I get filled in by Steve that after WNBC, Murray'd gone to WKTU and then WLIR. He'd done a regular syndicated radio show, scored some bucks with Beatlemania, got himself hired as consultant on a John Lennon movie, and, in addition to filming I Wanna Hold Your Hand, played a DJ in a flick called The Day The Music Died, with Jackie Zeman as his co-star. Murray'd met Jackie when she auditioned to be one of his K-Girl dancers at a Shaefer Festival concert. She nailed down the Nurse Bobbie role in TV's General Hospital and Murray'd married her. Jackie the K No. 2. If he'd lived, maybe Murray could've gotten himself nominated for President. He was full of surprises.
"How many people would you say there were?" Scott Muni asked, getting into the car after the memorial services. "Not more than 35, right? I was shocked!"
Scott'd said he needed a drink and we were looking for a bar. He steered me to one of his hangouts, the Delegate, on the East Side, near WNEW-FM, where Scott is now God. Scott'd designed the music format at the station after leaving Murray's WOR-FM and he'd been there ever since. The place wasn't exactly open for business yet, but they knew Scott.
"You can't come back from a funeral without needing a drink," Scott said. I ordered a Bloody Mary. Scott drinks Johnny Walker Red on the rocks.
"Here's to Murray," I said.
"Murray," he answered. He started telling about the time the attendant came upon Murray punching out Jackie the K No. 1 in the parking garage at the Lincoln Towers. When the attendant pulled Murray off, Murray turned on the attendant.
"He was just a little guy," Scott said. "But he was feisty. Once he took a punch at the doorman and the doorman decked him. Murray collected some money for that."
Since I'd last seen Scott, his lower lip'd been sliced nearly off in an auto crash. It took 60 stitches to keep the lip on his face, good news for a man who makes his living talking into a microphone. "Goom mormim, Mihmer am Mihmeh Amermima." For a while, Scott had trouble with his Fs and he grew a beard to camouflage the scar. He looked very tweedy and before long everyone started calling him "Professor." Now the beard's shaved and the nickname's tattooed. Everyone calls Scott "the Professor."
"Murray'd go into a fury every time Jack O'Brian called him 'Murray Decay,'" Scott said. "I'd have to get him a cup of water for the tranquilizers. O'Brian wouldn't stop. He kept printing shitty things about Murray and every time, instead of printing Murray the K, he'd call Murray 'Murray Decay.' And Murray'd have a nervous breakdown."
To people like Scott and me, Murray was the stuff that legends are made of. "Can you imagine?" Scott kept saying. "Murray's funeral!" he couldn't get comfortable with the fact of Murray's death. This was his first day of a world without Murray the K, he was trying to get used to it, like a new pair of boots that didn't quite fit.
"Did you hear about the fur coats?" Scott asked. "One Christmas, Murray's got to get some money. He was married to Jackie but he also had a blonde on the side. He'd had a long relationship with the blonde. So he goes to a furrier and buys two mink coats. Three thousand dollars apiece. One for Jackie and one for the blonde. But instead of taking the coats and just handing them to Jackie or the blonde, Murray's got to be a big shot. He has the furrier deliver the coats. You know what happened. Do I have to tell you? The furrier got the cards mixed up. Jackie gets the blonde's, the blonde gets Jackie's and they both get pissed off. It ended up, Murray lost both Jackie and the blonde and they kept the coats. The poor schmuck. He sure knew how to get something going, but he sure couldn't keep it going. Everything he touched turned to shit."
Scott paid for the drinks. He even gave me a 10-spot to get my car out of the garage. I just had enough money for gas and tolls. I was pretty drunk. In the parking garage, my car wouldn't start, so the attendants pushed me. The engine turned over but when I stopped to car to tip the attendants, it stalled. They didn't get their tip. I let the car roll into 43rd Street and paid two kids a dollar apiece to try another push start, but they couldn't get up enough steam because of all the people jaywalking back and forth for ashes at the church between Lexington and Third. Finally I found a van delivery driver with cables and paid him $5 for a jump. By that time, I wasn't drunk any more. I headed straight back home to Bearsville.
Somebody told me that Scott didn't go on the air that afternoon. When I phoned him, he didn't get back to me. I felt weird about Murray, too. He might've been a slapstick pioneer, stumbling on his discoveries like Inspector Clouseau, but he got there first. He might've been a fraud, but he made my world more of a fun place to live in. Back home, I fished into my files, because a journalist keeps files, and I pulled the folder marked "Murray the K." I reread my columns about Murray from 1971 and I choked. I wanted to write something about Murray, but I found I'd already written it. (Copyright (c) 1982 Al Aronowitz)##NEXT: HANGING OUT WITH BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATLES
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